ion demands not the death or the expulsion of the
secessionists, and, least of all, of those classes proscribed by the
President's proclamation of the 29th of May, 1865, nor even their
disfranchisement, perpetual or temporary; but their restoration to
citizenship, and their loyal co-operation with all true-hearted
Americans, in hearing the wounds inflicted on the whole country by the
civil war. There need be no fear to trust them. Their cause is lost;
they may or may not regret it, but lost it is, and lost forever. They
appealed to the ballot-box, and were defeated; they appealed from the
ballot-box to arms, to war, and have been again defeated, terribly
defeated. They know it and feel it. There is no further appeal for
them; the judgment of the court of last resort has been rendered, and
rendered against them. The cause is finished, the controversy closed,
never to be re-opened. Henceforth the Union is invincible, and it is
worse than idle to attempt to renew the war against it. Henceforth
their lot is bound up with that of the nation, and all their hopes and
interests, for themselves and their children, and their children's
children, depend on their being permitted to demean themselves
henceforth as peaceable and loyal American citizens. They must seek
their freedom, greatness, and glory in the freedom, greatness, and
glory of the American republic, in which, after all, they can be far
freer, greater, more glorious than in a separate and independent
confederacy. All the arguments and considerations urged by Union men
against their secession, come back to them now with redoubled force to
keep them henceforth loyal to the Union.

They cannot afford to lose the nation, and the nation cannot afford to
lose them. To hang or exile them, and depopulate and suffer to run to
waste the lands they had cultivated, were sad thrift, sadder than that
of deporting four millions of negroes and colored men. To exchange
only those excepted from amnesty and pardon by President Johnson,
embracing some two millions or more, the very pars sanior of the
Southern population, for what would remain or flock in to supply their
place, would be only the exchange of Glaucus and Diomed, gold for
brass; to disfranchise them, confiscate their estates, and place them
under the political control of the freedmen, lately their slaves, and
the ignorant and miserable "white trash," would be simply to render
rebellion chronic, and to convert seven